One of the true masters of contemporary cinema, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has won not only the admiration of audiences and critics worldwide, but also the support of directors as distinguished as Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Akira Kurosawa.
Kiarostami belongs to a generation of filmmakers who created the so called "New Wave", a movement in Iranian cinema that started in the 1960s, before the revolution of 1979 and flourished in the 1970s. Directors like Farrokhzad, Saless, Bayzai, and Kimiavi were the pioneers of this movement. They made innovative art films which had highly political and philosophical tones and poetic language.
Where is Friends Home/Where is Friends House? (1987) is a remarkable and simple piece of film which tells the story of a young school boy, Ahmed and his search for his friends house, Nema. Ahmed wishes to return Nema’s school book which he had accidentally taken, knowing that his friend will be in trouble by their teacher otherwise, the film outlines the moral drama of this boys life.
THE YOUNG VS THE OLD.. The search for Nema’s house is not in the slightest mundane, he is distracted by neighbours whom are mainly old which outlines and highlights childhood innocence to the maximum and different worlds that both generations live in. Questioning villagers about his friend's residence forms a rhythmic pattern that poetically grows in intensity as the film proceeds.
Selectively using Middle Eastern stringed instrumentation at certain key moments and using very few editing cuts, Kiarostami's camera remains in complete control throughout in creating a profoundly memorable portrait of rural life in modern Iran, and especially of the non-professional actors. This makes his work authenticity, the long intimate takes require the actors to remain in character all the way.
Little takes place in this film, most of the journey lies within, the audience an intimate view of the protagonist. In an interview Kiarostami discussed;
“I like to put audience’s to sleep in the cinema, it is important they leave untouched and unprovoked but at the same time the memory of my film will not be forgotten. Too many films these days provoke and belittle the audience”
By the end of Where is Friends Home/Where is my Friends House? you will feel like you know young Amed better than his own parents do. The poetic beauty of the film is unpretentious and flows like water, the audience is certainly not being belittled here and you are likely to seek out more films from this unconventional, award winning filmmaker.
One of the films gracing the BFI Film Festival this year is Teza. Set in 1970s Ethiopia, the film tells the story of young man, Anberber, returning to his home in Ethiopia after studying at University in Germany.
Anberber is faced with rapid change as he arrives back in his country at the height of the Cold War and under Marxist regime. He witnesses a murder whilst working in a health clinic and finds himself at odds with the gangsters whom are ruining his country.
As he is ordered to take a post in East Germany, Arberber uses this to escape until the Berlin Wall falls and the Ethipoia’s military regime is overthrown for good.
Fast forward a couple of decades, Anberber is now 60 and finally returns back to his village. On first glance all seems well, he finds comfort with his aging mother but realises his feelings of alienation from those around him. He is forever haunted by his brutal past.
Teza is an outstanding social-political film and screens at The Odeon West End on Thursday October 30th.
The Bicycle Thieves was made by Vittorio de Sica in 1948 and tells the story of a poor man having his most essential material possession stolen from him, namely his bike, and the long search for it with his son.The bike is what enables the male protagonist, Antonio Ricci to have his job, which is putting up film posters on the streets of Italy. His very job; putting up posters for films is very controversial, because in one shot, Antonio is putting up a poster of Rita Hayworth, a well known Hollywood star, this is to reflect the parallel universes that Italy and America are in.The disgust with Hollywood and the money making business it is, is always present in Italian Neo-Realist films.
There is a Marxist message which flows through Bicycle Thieves, the poster being one of them; Antonio our poor man has succumbed to putting up Hollywood film posters in a Depression struck Italy.In the scene where Antonio and Bruno go to the church to follow the mysterious old man who they hope will lead them to the bike, the church is penalised. Here we see each person present at church is given their free shave, salvation, and soup in an unsympathetic and mechanical manner.
The middle classes untouched by the immediacy of the poverty and unemployment of the reconstruction are seemingly timeless, attending church, football games and patronising restaurants.However this marks them as hypocritical. This reflects the church as a money making machine, but furthermore that people did not have much faith in them and attending not out for worships sake, but for survival sake.
Another scene which supports my argument is when Maria (Antonio’s wife) goes to the fortune teller, who turns out to be a money grabbing fraud.We see people lining up around her cosy living room waiting to hear their fortune, and even see Antonio skip the line, and the people getting angry, this reflects the desperation that many Italians felt about their future.
Desperation is constant in Italian-Neo-Realist films, as well as poverty and the existence of the class system. The trade union is attacked in Bicycle Thieves, another supposedly helpful institution. Antonio and Bruno are alone, alienated by the untouchable bourgeois culture; deprived of the trappings of silver cutlery in the restaurant, and from the movements of Rome, so often used as spatial signifier in other films.
In The Bicycle Thieves Rome is unsympathetic and selfish. This is a conscious break from Hollywood gloss. We see this when Antonio goes to the Italian restaurant with Bruno, from their mannerism we learn they never dine out.There is a wealthy family behind them on another table and we see their child look at Bruno in disgust, childhood innocence being corrupted is represented here.
The fact that Antonio takes Bruno with him on his search for his bike across the city just reflects this too, Bruno is more like Antonio’s mirror than a son, when he goes missing near the lake, and Antonio hardly cares.The scene where a screaming child is heard from the lake, Antonio finally looks worried but when he realises it is not his Bruno he turns around with a fed up facial expression. He does not even go to see if the child is okay, here we see the idea that people are out for themselves in the midst of poverty and desperation.
Italian Neo-Realist films offer progressive analysis of the world they represent; however they are not merely documentary films. Despite their realism there is a lot of poetic justice to their films, the use of dubbing in films not only reflect a realistic view point but an artistic one.
To my knowledge, all the directors in the central corpus of the loosely defined ‘neo-realist movement’ were left-wing like Visconti was Marxist. The patriarchal family and later the premature adulthood of Bruno are defined by the material object of the bicycle.According to Marxist analysis, the superstructure of society, including human relations, is defined by an economic base. In terms of neo-realist aesthetics, this was determined by restricted, sometimes whimsical filming equipment and technique. The realism of the long take, for example, influenced the message of the film, which portrayed working-class life and human reactions.Another subsequent theme of Italian Neo-Realist films were of open spacelocation shooting.
We see this is Bicycle Thieves and in Rossellini’s Rome Open City. They primarily did this as studios were hard to come by and expensive, but also to convey a raw image of post-war Italy.The use of non professional characters gave it that extra authentic trade mark, and a real life vision on Italians and how they lived. ‘Like many of the neo-realist directors, his primary aim in the Bicycle Thieves was to use the camera to show how people lived, whilst maintaining an objective distance’, I agree with this quote to an extent because in the scene near the end of the film when Antonio is procrastinating on stealing a random bicycle on the street.
The very act of stealing another man’s bike just shows again, the desperation of Italians in post-war Italy and how it is a never ending selfish battle.A better example of this is right at the end of the film when Bruno and Antonio have lost their pride by attempting to steal a bike. Having been embarrassingly caught, we see a high shot of a crowd of Italians. Bruno and Antonio start walking towards an unknown destination.
This gives us an objective view in once stance, as we see don’t know where they are actually walking to or what will become of Bruno and Antonio but the ending also directs us in thinking that their life will constantly be a struggle.
Going back to the scene when Antonio steals the bicycle, the police, in informing the journalist that “nothing” has happened, “It’s just a stolen bicycle” highlights the gulf between the unsympathetic law and the absolute dependence of Antonio on the bicycle.
This is a protest against the decadence of pre-war fascist cinema and Hollywood, which would feel compelled to choose a more exciting subject matter such as the modern Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Here we have suspicions the thief may be for entertainment value and the bike looks attractive and exists merely for pleasure value.
Unlike Antonio, where the loss of his bike, means a loss of his job. It shows us that their films might provide entertainment to the forces of sensationalism, but it is empty in relation to the personal drama of one man.All Italian-Neo Realist films carry a similar pattern, and constant themes in reflecting the depiction of glamorous America and the desperation of Italy. The films were brutally honest scenarios with a simple yet important plot line, important, in terms of its social message.
Whilst Italian Neo-Realist films were being produced, Hollywood continued producing films based idealism, glossed films as a form of escapism from the chaos that the rest of the world was going through. On one hand this is necessary as it may have given hope to the masses or even a healthy form of escapism.However the naivety of the subject matter in Hollywood films at the time gave a negative view stigma- Being ruthless, unaware and unsympathetic. Italian Neo-Realist films offered a cathartic impact to audiences during post-war Italy and in my opinion that is what films should be appreciated and respected for.
Heathers (1989) centres around Veronika played by the wonderful, Winona Ryder writing a series of diary entries about her horrible power hungry friends. It was a teen high school picture with an edge, a very dark edgy namely due to Christan Slater playing the new kid at school. He is the mysterious, murderous and intellectual, JD.
So we have four friends; Heather, Heather, Heather and Veronika. Yes, they're all called Heather apart from the fourth one, it was not merely a typing error. They go to parties, carry out school surveys each lunch time, make fun of the fat, ugly and disabled. They partake in other school rituals that so called popular girls are supposed to do in this strange and dark representation of a High School.
The film is a black comedy because quite frankly it is random in a lot of ways, scenes and conversations seems just placed in as if from the directors subconscious. However much random the set out of this particular black comedy is, it seems to work perfectly and there are a hundred different moral messages left open to the audience to discover and contemplate.
There is the book by Herman Menville, ' Moby Dick' for example, the repetitive use of the work 'Eskimo' and the stark colours of Blue, Red and Green that seem to stand out in the midst of this smokey and peculiar film. It works perfectly and ultimately projects film as a medium of art which is very rare these days. It has also been an inspiration to other teen movies with an 'edge' such as Mean Girls and Jawbreaker. I urge you to watch Heathers and then watch the other two films.
Another reason it's so dark is due to the screenplay by Daniel Waters, he revolutionised the way we see teen films. With lines such as "You are such a pillow case" and "Well, fuck me slowly with a chainsaw", the film clearly is hitting back at teen movies from the past. These teens are real or are they? It suggests that teen characters have been stereotyped so much they have lost the sense of identity, this is a major theme of the film.
What has happened? We are now subjected to The House Bunny (2008) an awful film about an ex playboy bunny who finds a new job at a Sobriety house of 'losers'. These losers are not celebrated for their eccentricities, oh no. They are laughed at and then changed into stereotypical images of what is 'sexy' and 'cool' by American standards. Its terrible. Films are no longer art, they are moral messages.
You either appreciate black comedies or you don't. Beyond the brutal humour and random'ness lies a philosophical essence, so I encourage you to watch closer next time you watch a teen movie with an 'edge' or any movie with an dark side that is frankly, funny.
